Two years ago, Elena Roger wowed the West End as Eva Peron in Evita at the Adelphi. Back on the Strand, she's knocking 'em dead all over again, this time singing her heart out as another indomitable woman of courage, Edith Piaf, in Pam Gems's reliable but oddly too rough-and-ready account of the chanteuse's life.

Any doubts that Jamie Lloyd's hit transfer would fail to scale up from the Donmar's legendary intimacy to the grander environment of a playhouse are swiftly dispelled by the bravura confidence of his exquisitely lit production and the panache of Roger's Piaf.

It might sound pat to say you forget you're watching an impersonation, but the sheer force of personality bursting from Roger's diminutive frame garners ecstatic applause for the actress as though she and "the Little Sparrow" were one and the same diva.

Roger is a fantastic physical match for a singer who was less than 5ft tall. Where she also excels, though, is in fleshing out the fine detail of Piaf's gutter-bred mien: she's got the sly smile of an alley cat, a ruffian shiftiness of glance, and holds herself with the clenched stillness of a street fighter readying for the first blows.

Gems's newly amended 1979 play - which interweaves vignettes of the life with corresponding highlights from the chanson catalogue - characterises Piaf's progress from louche Parisian backstreets to international stardom as one of relentless struggle.

She may have made others' spirits soar, but there was too much pain, some of it inflicted through her own trouble-making, to lift her out of the doldrums for long. Physically crippled, emotionally scarred, she battled against morphine addiction with only half a will to conquer its escapist excesses.

It's a seductive account of a lonely, live-for-the-moment existence. It helps sidestep the least attractive sides of Piaf's character; the way, for example, she binned casual lovers like so many stubbed-out Gauloises.

Yet if you get through the very un-Gallic dash of Gems's version, a hurtling sense of chaotic adventure, you don't learn enough of Piaf's interior world - enough, that is, to finally, fully care.

After a wham-bam-thank you-madame 90 minutes, what you're left with is the puff-of-smoke sensation of having been in her stellar presence, and those mournful classics - among them Mon Dieu and, inevitably, Je Ne Regrette Rien - revolving in your mind, bringing an involuntary tear to the eye as autumn leaves start to fall.